THE CONFESSION
When Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of mutual aid, thereby putting aside for the time being the always sensitive question of borders, wide horizons of mutual cooperation opened up to the police of both countries. The Czech police handed over the names of several Sudeten Germans, proven spies of the Reich, while in return the Soviets gave them information about some former Czech dozens of no great importance to Soviet Intelligence and others who could not justify their flight into the Soviet Union on ideological grounds. Among the latter was a certain Micksat Hantesku, called Miksha. Since the Czech police thought him to be a murderer (the connection between the murdered girl, the disappearance of Hantesku, and Aimicke’s statement was not difficult to make), they asked that he be handed over. Only then did Soviet Intelligence pay attention to the citizen M. L. Hanteshy, who worked on the state farm Red Freedom, where he was an excellent slaughterhouse worker. He was arrested in November 1936. After nine months of solitary confinement and dreadful torture, during which almost all his teeth were knocked out and his collarbone broken, Miksha finally asked to see the interrogator. They gave him a chair, a sheet of coarse paper, and a penal. They told him: “Write, and stop making demands!'" Miksha confessed, in black and white, that over two years ago, as a duty to the Patty, he had killed the traitor and provocateur Hanna Krzyzewska, but he resolutely denied having raped her. While he wrote out the confession in his rough peasant hand, he was observed, from the wall of the modest interrogator's office, by the portrait of the One Who Must Be Believed. Miksha looked up at that portrait, at that good-natured, smiling face, the kind face of a wise old man, so much like his grandfather's; he looked up at him pleadingly, and with reverence. After months of starvation, beating, and torture, this was a bright moment in Miksha’s life, this warm and pleasant interrogator’s office, where an old Russian stove crackled as one had long ago in Miksha’s house in Bukovina, this tranquillity beyond the muffled blows and the shrieks of prisoners, this portrait that smiled at him so like a father. In a sudden rapture of faith, Miksha wrote down his confession: that he was an agent of the Gestapo, that he had worked to sabotage the Soviet government. At the same time he cited twelve accomplices in the great conspiracy. They were: I. V. Torbukor, an engineer; I. K. Goldman, a supervisor of operations at a chemical factory in Kamerov; A. K. Berlicky, a surveyor and Party secretary of a state farm; М. V. Korelin, a district judge; F. M. Olshevsky, the president of the Krasnoyarsk collective farm; S. I. Solovyeva, a teacher of history; E. V. Kvapilova, a professor; M. M. Nehavkim, a priest; D. M. Dogatkin, a physicist; J. K. Maresku, a typesetter; E. M. Mendel, a master tailor; and M. L. Jusef, a tailor.
Each of them received twenty years. At dawn on May 18, 1938, in the Butirek prison yard, with the noise of running tractors in the background, the alleged leader and organizer of the conspiracy, A. К. Berlicky, was shot, along with twenty-nine members of another conspiracy.
Micksat Hantesku died of pellagra in Ezvestkovo Prison Camp on New Year's Eve, 1941.
The Sow That Eats Her Farrow
{FOR BORISLAV PEKIĆ}
THE LAND OF ETERNITY
The first act of the tragedy, or comedy (in the scholastic sense of the word), whose main character is a certain Gould Verschoyle, begins as all earthly tragedies do: with birth. The rejected positivist formula of milieu and race can be applied to human beings to the same degree as to Flemish art. Thus the first act of the tragedy begins in Ireland, “the ultima Thule, the land on the other side of knowledge", as one of Dedalus's doubles calls it; in Ireland, "the land of sadness, hunger, despair, and violence", according to another explorer, who is less inclined to myth and more to laborious earthy prose. However, in him too a certain lyrical quality is not in harmony with the cruelty of the region:“The ultimate step of the sunset, Ireland is the last land to see the fading of the day. Night has already fallen on Europe while the slanting rays of the sun still purple the fjords and wastelands in the West. But let the dark clouds form, let a star fall, and suddenly the island again becomes as in a legend, that distant place covered with fog and darkness, which for so long marked the boundary of the known world to navigators. And on the other side is a break: the dark sea in which the dead once found their land of eternity. Their black ships on shores with strange names testify to a time when travel had something metaphysical about it: they summon up dreams without shores, without return "
THE ECCENTRICS
Dublin is a city that breeds a menagerie of eccentrics, the most notorious in the whole Western world: nobly disappointed, aggressive bohemians, professors in redingotes, superfluous prostitutes, infamous drunkards, tattered prophets, fanatical revolutionaries, sick nationalists, flaming anarchists, widows decked out in combs and jewelry, hooded priests. All day long this carnivalesque cohort parades along the Liffey. In the absence of more reliable sources, Bourniquel's picture of Dublin enables us to get a sense of the experience Gould Verschoyle would inevitably take with him from the island, an experience that is drawn into the soul just as the terrible stench of fish meal from the cannery near the harbor is drawn into the lungs.
With a certain rash anticipation, we would be inclined to view this carnivalesque cohort as the last image our hero would see in a rapid succession of images: the noble menagerie of Irish eccentrics (to which, in some ways, he also belonged) descending along the Liffey all the way down to the anchorage, and disappearing as if into hell.
THE BLACK MARSH
Gould Verschoyle was born in one such suburb of Dublin within reach of the harbor, where he listened to ships' whistles, that piercing howl which tells the righteous young heart that there ate worlds and nations outside “Dubh-linn,” this black marsh in which the stench and injustice are mote heavily oppressive than anywhere else. Following the example of his father-who rose from bribe-taking customs official to even more wretched (in the moral sense) bureaucrat, and from passionate Pamellite to bootlicker and puritan-Gould Verschoyle acquired a revulsion for his native land, which is only one of the guises of perverted and masochistic patriotism. "The cracked looking glass of a servant, the sow that cats her farrow”-at nineteen Verschoyle wrote this cruel sentence, which referred more to Ireland than to his parents.
Wearied by the vain prattle in dark pubs where conspiracies and assassinations were plotted by phony priests, poets, and traitors, Gould Verschoyle wrote in his journal the sentence spoken by a certain tall nearsighted student, without foreseeing the tragic consequence that these words would have; "Anyone with any self-respect cannot bear to remain in Ireland and must go into exile, fleeing the country struck by the wrathful hand of Jupiter".
This was written in the entry for May 19, 1935.
In August of the same year he boarded a merchant ship, the Ringsend, which was sailing for Morocco. After a three — day stopover in Marseilles, the Ringsend sailed without one of its crew; or, to be exact, the place of the radio operator Verschoyle was filled by a newcomer. In February 1936 we find Gould Verschoyle near Guadalajara in the 15th Anglo-American Brigade bearing the name of the legendary Lincoln. Verschoyle was then twenty-eight years old.
FADED PHOTOGRAPHS
Here the reliability of the documents, resembling, as they do, palimpsests, is suspended for a moment. The life of Gould Verschoyle blends and merges with the life and death of the young Spanish Republic, We have only two snapshots. One, with an unknown soldier next to the ruins of a shrine. On the back, in Verschoyle's handwriting: ''Alcazar. Viva la Republics'’ His high forehead is half covered by a Basque beret, a smile hovers around his lips, on which one can read (from today's perspective) the triumph of the victor and the bitterness of the defeated: the paradoxical reflections that, like a line on the forehead, foreshadow inevitable death. Also, a group snapshot with the date November 5, 1936. The picture is blurred. Verschoyle is in the second row, still with a Basque beret pulled over his forehead. In front of the lined-up group a landscape stretches out, and it would not be hard to believe that we are in a cemetery. Is this the Honor Guard that fired salvos into the sky or into living flesh? The face of Gould Verschoyle jealously guards this secret. Over the rows of soldiers' heads, in the distant blue an airplane hovers like a crucifix.